Australia plans Chinese-style internet filtering

The Australian government has announced controversial plans for Chinese-style compulsory filtering of the internet, rejecting criticism the measures will strangle free speech.

Stephen Conroy, Australia's communications ministerPhoto: AFP

By Paul Chapman

3:03PM GMT 15 Dec 2009

Stephen Conroy, the communications minister, was accused of plotting a "great firewall of Australia" when he said on Tuesday that the legislation, to be introduced early next year, would require all internet service providers to block objectionable material hosted on overseas servers.

He said such material would include "child sex abuse content, bestiality, sexual violence and the detailed instruction of crime and drug use".

Senator Conroy said: "Most Australians acknowledge there is some internet content which is not acceptable in any civilised society.

"It is important that all Australians, but especially children, are protected from this material."

Similar content on domestically hosted websites can already be banned if the sites are included on a blacklist drawn up by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, a government body.

The authority's blacklist caused controversy earlier this year when it was revealed that innocent websites of a dentist's practice in Queensland, a tuck-shop consultant and a kennel operator had mistakenly been included.

Under the new measures, blocked sites would be determined by an independent classification body via a "public complaint" process, Senator Conroy said.

His announcement came at the end of a seven-month trial, which the government says showed that blocking can be done with 100 per cent accuracy and without slowing down internet speeds, another objection made by critics.

Oliver MacColl, acting national director of GetUp!, an internet users' lobby group, said the planned legislation "hands control of the internet to the moral minority".

"It was through public complaints mechanisms like the one Mr Conroy is proposing that classic literature such as The Catcher in the Rye, Ulysses, and The Story of the Kelly Gang were once banned in Australia.

"Innocent people have already been caught in the blacklist," he told Australia's ABC News.

"The introduction of Mr Conroy's great firewall of Australia may lead to many more innocent small business-people being caught out."

Colin Jacobs, vice-chairman of Electronic Frontiers Australia, which monitors online freedoms and rights, said: "People will be worried about the fact that the government will have a secret blacklist that is not very compatible with our status as a democracy and a free society."

Opposition also came from the Greens, with Senator Scott Ludlam threatening the legislation would be given "a very bumpy ride".

"It looks very much to me as though this is a solution in search of a problem," he said.

"At this stage I haven't seen anything at all that justifies the implementation of mandatory net censorship in Australia."

But the measures were welcomed by the Australian Christian Lobby, which called for the scope of the internet filter to be expanded beyond its present limits within three years.

In June, Beijing postponed a plan to install internet filtering software on all computers sold in China after a storm of protest.

It maintains broad internet censorship under a series of controls dubbed "the Great Firewall of China".